Thursday, October 13, 2005

Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate

The last play of Pinter's I saw was The Lover, at Yale, in the summer of 2004. There is a review of it at Harold Pinter's web site, but it gives away an important secret.

My review would simply be: Harold Pinter's The Lover is a perfectly shaped and somewhat demonic play about marriage. It's challenging and psychologically disorienting, but still essentially realist in form.

But he's a playwright, and his stuff really comes alive when it's performed. Maybe one of the movies for which he wrote the screenplay? IMDB also has him involved with lots and lots of British TV. Some of that stuff might be in video stores. And I suspect there might be a version of the film version of the Birthday Party in some video stores (better ones).

Pinter was also involved with the Kyle MacLachlan version of Kafka's The Trial as well as the Greta Scacchi (?) version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Both are pretty good movies... Could be a good place to start.

I don't think it's especially political. Much of Pinter's best stuff from the 1960s is apolitical, actually. Here is a short summary of The Birthday Party:

His first full-length play, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, was first performed by Bristol University's drama department in 1957 and produced in 1958 in the West End. The play, which closed with disastrous reviews after one week, dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He tries to run away but is tracked down.

It could be sort of political in that the situation might be a reference to life in a police state. (In an interview I heard on NPR he talked about how popular the play was with Iranians in the 1970s). But the theme is mainly abstract.

Though Pinter's always been a bit of a rebel, as I understand it it's only in the past five years that he's gone full-time into political activism (anti-US in Iraq).

And some of his recent political positions have been a bit dodgy. Take this:

During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Pinter condemned Nato's intervention and said it will "only aggravate the misery and the horror and devastate the country". In 2001 Pinter joined The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, which also included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Milosevic was arrested by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, which plans to try him on charges of crimes against humanity.

A little nutty, siding with Milosevic.

All in all, it doesn't really add up to a political statement by the Swedish Academy. He really is one of the living greats of English drama... and fully deserves the recognition.

Hitchens has become such a blowhard, he feels he must sign off on everything that seems to sound with the American Right. A strange fact considering he would likely accuse the American left of being an echo chamber of the international left. Really Chris, you were more interesting as a leftie.

Not to turn this into a thread about the Hitch, but I'm also amused at his recent need to voice an opinion on everything and everybody - Orwell, Jefferson, now he's an expert on Pinter. Btw, incase the irony was not evident, what I meant to to say was that the comment was "interesting".

The guy has done some great, groundbreaking stuff. People on the right are practicing a form of reverse political correctness when they criticize the choice of Pinter because of his left-wing (and sometimes misguided) politics.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.